We can complicate our relationship with Spirit, as with any relationship. Yet, in simplicity, we discover Spirit. We were lost in thoughts about Spirit.
Love is not complicated. We can make matters cumbersome and speak of how challenging love is. It is not. We create the difficulty, not love. Behind complexity, people hide. They speak of seeking God when God is obvious, inescapable, and unavoidable - what we have been taught (i.e., ideas) about God hides God from us. We get lost. Is God lost so that we need to try to find God? God is not, but we can be even amid our enlightened thoughts.
We also easily manage to make religion a complex matter with many distractions. Why? We have been trained not to see the simplicity of God, so of love.
Someone spoke in an interfaith sangha about the challenge of awareness of God outside of the time of Prayer. Yet, this, too, is simple. The challenge is a tendency to problematizing this, turning it into another thing to do - something we must think about. Awareness of God is a thoughtless, wholehearted presence to what we are doing this moment. We need out of the head and fully into the whole body, into the whole experience inside and outside as one sacramental union.
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Teresa of Avila cuts through the mental bafflegab of the mind. For her, the essence of the Way is to let the heart overflow with love. To assist, we imbibe of what awakens this ever-flowing, ever-deepening love. What is complicated about this? Problematic?
Hence, to live the Presence of love - or remember God - means to enjoy love, both the awakening within ourselves and the outpouring of it in the world. We emerge to understand we do not have to think about God - or anything or anyone - to know, experience, and share God, or love.
If an atheist enjoys a moment of loving or being loved, the atheist has enjoyed God-beyod-'God.' Yet, the God the atheist and theist think and speak of, either in disbelief or belief, is not God - this the non-believer and believer share in common. Likewise, love is free of thoughts about what love is or can be. Love is free of our need to think about love. In union with love, the thought vanishes.
Do we understand what love is? No. We can, however, know what it is. A man attending one of my interspiritual groups said he did not believe in love. He does not know what he does not believe in, so how can he be sure he does not believe in it? He thinks he knows what he does not believe in, but his thought is a figment of imagination. Like all of us, he needs to drop his head; then, love will show him what love is, even without him believing in it. He will not believe in an idea of love; he will know, for he will be known. He will be in a relationship. The distance is resolved but not in the head.
The thought of God is like the lover unable to enjoy passionate lovemaking with his beloved, for he refuses to stop thinking about her. He talks about her to others and keeps telling her how lovely she is, pointing out the particulars he admires. He is infatuated with what he thinks of her. His words are thoughts put into letters. She wants him to stop thinking of her and surrender into the union of the two in a passionate, thoughtless embrace. She is frustrated with the distance. Enamored with the idea of anything is the distance.
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Let us drop our heads into our hearts and attend to what nurtures love. We can ask of anything, "Does this awaken love within me?" Then, love seeps out our pores or pours out our pores. We know God whether we even think about God. We may find we feel less of a need to think about God when we know - actually, that is so. And to know, we disbelieve in our previous thoughts. When you have crossed the river, why keep trying to paddle the boat?
Still, thoughts can help us until they no longer are helping us. They can help us the whole Way as signs. Simply do not hug the signs once you no longer need to. 'God' and 'love,' as 'I' and 'other,' are signs. Again, I call this letting the head drop into the heart or taking off your head. In the heart, we know, for we become intimate with the Truth of all things. There is no knowing outside of intimacy. With intimacy, we spontaneously know, but we do not know how we know or understand what we know. In intimacy, we do not wish to live or look from outside. We know the Truth nonverbally and nonconceptually. This is what Buddhists mean by wisdom and Christians by union. We could call this heart-knowing, if we wish.
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*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2023. Permission is given to use photographs and writings with credit given to the copyright owner.
*Brian's book is An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love. The book is a collection of poems Brian wrote based on wisdom traditions, predominantly Christian, Buddhist, and Sufi, with extensive notes on the poetry's teachings and imagery.
